And Now The Science Bit (part two)

There was a lot to see at The Science Museum and so I feel it justifies 2 blog posts...  

Like a lot of the big London Museums, entrance is free but with a suggested donation.  However, there are sometimes temporary exhibitions, talks and film screenings within the building and there may be charges for these.  There was an exhibition on 3-D printing - a fairly recent innovation which is developing quickly and which we'll see a lot more of in the future.

Engineering

On the third floor, there was a huge area devoted to flight.  Its definitely an area of science, and an important one at that, but it also seemed to be an excuse to display loads of planes, just because they could!

Don't get me wrong, I love old planes (and was the last one out during a family visit to Tangmere Military Aviation Museum near Chichester!) but when there are so many grouped together like this, I feel the emphasis is more on history than science.  The exhibition here fell somewhere between the two and felt out of place.

But having said that, as I had suddenly found myself transported to an aviation museum, no visit would be complete without a mention of my home town hero from the Potteries, Reginald Mitchell, the inventor of the Spitfire (along with at least 23 other different aircraft). 

There was a specially commissioned sculpture of him made by self-taught artist Stephen Kettle and constructed out of 400,000 stacked pieces of Welsh slate.

My verdict on the Science Museum?  Well, its definitely worth a visit and there are some interesting things to see, but don't expect full-on science as there's also a lot of history, art and design.  Some of the exhibits lacked information/explanation (or it was not easy to access) and the layout of the exhibits didn't seem to flow very well (although I think some renovations were going on at the time, which probably contributed to this).  All in all though, its a good place to spend a few hours, and the kids will love it!